HEY YOU. The living!

The lasting legacy of the film festival has been a snobby disdain for ordinary films. So yesterday, I ventured off to see the Swedish film You, the living with my fabulous film festival friend (FFFF). We had to see it because David Stratton described it as a ”must for serious cinema buffs” or words to that effect. We were in search of something different; beyond “nice little films”.

You, the living is a sort of shout of a title. It’s in your face in a way that the film is not. It’s demanding something of us. “Hey you” – it’s saying. “Take some notice. This is important.” Because the opposite is what – we, the dead? It comes from Goethe: “Be pleased then, you, the living, in your delightfully warmed bed, before Lethe's ice-cold wave will lick your escaping foot.” Early in the film a tram pulls up. Its destination is "Lethe". People spill out and the tram moves on. I knew that Lethe meant “forgetfulness” but Wikipedia also says "In Classical Greek, Lethe literally means "forgetfulness" or "concealment". It’s related to the Greek word for "truth", meaning "un-forgetfulness" or "un-concealment". In Greek mythology, Lethe is one of the several rivers of Hades: those who drank from it experienced complete forgetfulness." In the film’s context, I think it means “Don’t forget you are alive, be alive to the ephemeralness of our condition. Get off the tram!” Or maybe that’s just my current take on things.

Certainly the other part of the quote is at odds with much of the activity in the film. There is little in the film to suggest “delightfully warmed bed”. It’s shot in a limey institutional green; the interiors of houses, street scenes, bars and deserted office foyers tinged in a brooding green sepia. I loved the colour; it created a consistent link between the 50 vignettes of the film and added to the impression that I had of floating like a dust mote through the film. There is no grand plot although one reviewer I read quoted film maker Roy Andersson as saying the film is “about the vulnerability of human beings”.

I warmed to the film over time. Early scenes, such as a surreal china-smashing, execution-causing vignette seemed to try too hard; I was reminded of Monty Python but not in a good way. Similarly a singing scene where a son puts the hard word on his father for cash. And yet other much more ordinary scenes seemed filled with the pathos of being alive. The overweight woman with the beautiful mouth feels ugly and depressed. Nothing her partner can do or say will make her feel better. She tells him to piss off; we’ve all been there. The psychiatrist is tired of working with people who can’t be happy; they are mean at heart. The film allowed you thinking space; I floated off thinking about a friend whose middle name is schadenfreude. (I saw her recently and I was struck with how tiring it is to be with her because of her meanness.) The lack of a strong plot line allowed space for a much more significant personal interaction with the film while it was screening.

And the most beautiful scene for me is the wedding dream. A young girl tells the bar crowd “I dreamt that I married Micke” (the lead guitarist in a band). Her dream is the culmination of a series of fantasies about Micke and an actual meeting. Every teenager has had the “meet the rock star” gauche moment or has dreamt of it. Her post wedding fantasy has a lyrical beauty about it, she gorgeous in wedding dress, opening presents, he wedded to guitar, playing lovely, lovely music. The scene morphs into a surreal train journey and they pull into a station to be greeted by an adoring crowd. But also as Naomi, my FFFF pointed out, underneath the lyricism is a reality; he is much more in love with himself, his guitar and the crowd (in that order) than her so the relationship is pretty doomed.

I was reminded of many of the European films I saw in the 70s. I think the connection is the interest in the surreal and in the disturbance of the surburban veneer to uncover both the ordinariness and the vulnerability of the human condition. One wonderful scene illustrates this. A man is on a balcony as night falls. Across from him, through a window, we can see the tail-end of a bizarre silly scene that we, the film watchers have been up close to prior to this scene but the watcher seems largely oblivious to it. From another room, we hear his wife asking ”What are you thinking?” He is smoking. Not thinking, smoking. And probably scratching his balls. Again she pleads “What are you thinking?” We know that he is thinking of nothing, just daydreaming with his cigarette. She is seeking to connect. He is not deliberately evasive; just not on her wavelength. And she not on his. The human condition.

I thought a lot of Bunuel while I was watching the film and was pleased to read a similar thought in a review by Philip French in The Observer: “Some years later, after marrying a Swede, I gave myself a crash course in Scandinavian culture that revealed a conventional wisdom claimed not to exist - the Scandinavian sense of humour. This is a mordant, quirky, melancholic affair, exhibited by that archetypal malcontent Hamlet, and to be found in, among others, Ibsen, Hans Andersen, Strindberg, Bergman, Astrid Lindgren and Frans G Bengtsson's wonderful adventure novel The Long Ships. Both movies (he means this and Andersson’s third film) are tragicomedies. If they belong in an artistic tradition, it would be Surrealism or the theatre of the absurd and their particular affinities are with Buñuel and Ionesco.”

Lovely to see a film, even though I was irritated by parts of it, that let you float in a river of associations and feelings. It’s Andersson’s fourth in four decades; he is 64 and maybe that’s where Lethe’s ice-cold foot finds real bite.